[Download] "Sins of the Blood: Rewriting the Family in Two Postmodern Vampire Novels (Critical Essay)" by Louis Greenberg # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Sins of the Blood: Rewriting the Family in Two Postmodern Vampire Novels (Critical Essay)
- Author : Louis Greenberg
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 91 KB
Description
Postmodern vampire novels often concern themselves with issues surrounding Western family life. In this article I will compare the presentation of family violence in Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls (1992) and Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Sins of the Blood (1995). Brite's radical subversion contrasts interestingly with Rusch's appeal to less radically reinscribed, liberal values. These novels position their characters in suburban locales, where traditional family dynamics and upbringings are the accepted norm and where the inequalities of these structures are perpetuated. This traditional milieu, with its veneer of order, is often shown to be the breeding place of psychoses and antisocial behaviour, and of cycles of inherited violence. Whereas Rusch's liberal critique stops here, a key example of the genre's radical potential is Brite's exploration of self-chosen and unorthodox family structures as a subversive option to the violence of the hegemonic norm. The inherently subversive, proximate, queer figure of the vampire acts as a catalyst for this interrogation, playing the role, in its chameleonic fashion, of any family member, from abusive father to alluring sister, or standing on the margins of human society and subtly making us compare it to ourselves. In fiction written before Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, from Victorian Gothic horror through to the pulp period of the 1950s and 60s, the vampire was presented as a monster to be destroyed with little thought, ultimately passive and ineffectual. Dracula's threat, for example, like that of most pre-Rice vampires, was certainly grave on a physical level for the characters concerned, but he could not successfully challenge them where it really mattered: their ideology, their sense of moral-religious-ethnic superiority, their faith in civilisation remained intact, and won out eventually. Dracula was a foreign presence and his threat to the hegemony was easily neutralised by marginalisation. Seen simplistically, all it took was trust in England or America, an easy trust learned from babyhood, to defeat the abject and marginal creature.